Even though certain elements of this film were quite predictable, I felt it was executed in a clever enough fashion to keep it entertaining and exciting. Right up until the ending, of course.
SPOILERS: As soon as I heard the serial killer was a young black woman I knew no one in PC Hollywood would dare make her the bad guy, so obviously all her seemingly random murders were going to be justified somehow. Honestly, I can't even blame Hollywood for that. Women are almost never serial killers, and because people don't understand statistics and population percentages, there is a general public perception that whites are the most likely to be serial killers. So when all the shiftless 'woke' activists with nothing better to do than protest learned there was a film featuring an evil black woman serial killer, they'd have burned the studio down (probably metaphorically). Hollywood exists to make money, and that's not how you do it. So yeah, the "twist" that she's actually justified was over before it even began, but that didn't really spoil the film. It was still interesting to see how it played out, and to try to figure out what the "justification" would be. (More on that later.)
The traveling backward through time was equally easy to figure out, right from the first sequence when we found out she had a bullet wound from a service piece but no one had fired a shot. (You have to ignore the plot holes here. They WOULD have run the ballistics, particularly on the guy who witnessed her death, whether they thought his gun had been fired or not, and they'd have figured out the ballistics matched. Moreover, that gun was the property of the PPD. When he quit or got fired, they wouldn't have let him keep it.) Moreover, the "I'm sorry about your partner," when it turned out his partner hadn't been killed was a dead giveaway that he was GOING to be killed, just in the next iteration.
There were other things, of course, but ultimately these predictable elements were still up in the air enough that the good writing kept the whole thing interesting regardless.
The problems were all with the ending of course. And not in a "I didn't like the ending so it's bad," sort of way. This film reminded me a lot of 12 Monkeys, which I coincidentally just rewatched. The ending is similarly tragic, in that the character knows how it ends and can't stop it from happening. Except unlike 12 Monkeys, where everyone knows from the start that you can't change the past, only learn from it, this film has the whole thing ass-backward.
The main character can't change the past of how things play out with the time traveling assassin, but the time traveling assassin CAN change the past of the terrible event she's trying to prevent. It's self-contradictory. Either the past can be changed or it can't. Even worse, in the assassin's timeline she learns who he is on her first trip back in time. All she needs to do in the second one, or the third, or even the fourth when it's all messed up already, is tell him who she is. But she doesn't, because REASONS. No really, there are no reasons. She just doesn't do it, because it would spoil the plot. Only the ending reveals that the plot is nonsensical for this reason, so... Yeah, that's just bad writing.
But it's worse than that. 12 Monkeys is tragic because the good guy fails, the bad guy wins, and the world as we know it ends. This movie is written to be the opposite, where the twist is that the guy we've been following is NOT the good guy- the good guy is the time traveling assassin who we have to assume succeeds in "saving the world."
But this is where it goes totally Watchmen on us. The assassin is murdering innocent people who might have somehow influenced someone else in a way that causes those other people to engage in acts of evil which in turn influence other people to engage in evil in a vicious spiral of horror. But don't lose the forest in all those trees. The assassin is murdering innocent people. Period. Full stop.
This isn't "going back to kill Hitler to prevent WWII." This is going back to kill Hitler's innocent music teacher who damaged his fragile psyche as a child by giving him a scolding that would have been beneficial to any normal child. And his innocent history teacher for instilling in him a sense of pride in German history. And killing some random radio announcer in England who said something negative about the Weimar Republic and got Hitler thinking, "I should overthrow this thing." The guy who created time travel in the film says exactly that. Anyone they have to kill to achieve their goal, no matter how innocent.
Make no mistake, these people are MONSTERS. In the Watchmen the big twist is that superheroes are just flawed people who don't always do the right thing or even agree on what the right thing is, but even in that morally relative story the real "heroes" do everything in their power to stop Ozymandias from murdering innocent people "for the greater good." They're just too late. Even then they can't agree on whether it's best to accept the atrocity and try to make the most of it or to expose Ozymandias for his horrible crimes, and to the writers' credit, the give the final word to the only guy who stands by his principles and the truth.
But in this film the hero arrives in time. He has a chance to stop the monster before all the innocents die. And he decides not to. In fact, the entire twist and tone are arranged as if we're supposed to be on the monster's side. Oh, she's murdering innocent people "for the greater good!" In that case, help yourself! Geeze, don't we feel like jerks for trying to save those innocents.
Look, moral philosophy is tough. There are no clear cut right and wrong answers or dividing lines. That's why great minds have been debating these subjects for as long as humans have been around. But if you came away from this film thinking, "Yeah, the time traveling assassin is right..." Well, I just hope you're never in any sort of position of power or public trust, because with that kind of thinking there is literally no atrocity you can't and won't justify. If you're not willing to draw the line at intentionally brutally murdering innocent people, where DO you draw the line?
So yeah, I this film was on track to receive a much higher rating until the very end when its plot fell apart with the whole self-contradictory time travel nonsense, and its tone went completely inverted with the "evil is okay if we're doing it for a good cause," thing.
SPOILERS: As soon as I heard the serial killer was a young black woman I knew no one in PC Hollywood would dare make her the bad guy, so obviously all her seemingly random murders were going to be justified somehow. Honestly, I can't even blame Hollywood for that. Women are almost never serial killers, and because people don't understand statistics and population percentages, there is a general public perception that whites are the most likely to be serial killers. So when all the shiftless 'woke' activists with nothing better to do than protest learned there was a film featuring an evil black woman serial killer, they'd have burned the studio down (probably metaphorically). Hollywood exists to make money, and that's not how you do it. So yeah, the "twist" that she's actually justified was over before it even began, but that didn't really spoil the film. It was still interesting to see how it played out, and to try to figure out what the "justification" would be. (More on that later.)
The traveling backward through time was equally easy to figure out, right from the first sequence when we found out she had a bullet wound from a service piece but no one had fired a shot. (You have to ignore the plot holes here. They WOULD have run the ballistics, particularly on the guy who witnessed her death, whether they thought his gun had been fired or not, and they'd have figured out the ballistics matched. Moreover, that gun was the property of the PPD. When he quit or got fired, they wouldn't have let him keep it.) Moreover, the "I'm sorry about your partner," when it turned out his partner hadn't been killed was a dead giveaway that he was GOING to be killed, just in the next iteration.
There were other things, of course, but ultimately these predictable elements were still up in the air enough that the good writing kept the whole thing interesting regardless.
The problems were all with the ending of course. And not in a "I didn't like the ending so it's bad," sort of way. This film reminded me a lot of 12 Monkeys, which I coincidentally just rewatched. The ending is similarly tragic, in that the character knows how it ends and can't stop it from happening. Except unlike 12 Monkeys, where everyone knows from the start that you can't change the past, only learn from it, this film has the whole thing ass-backward.
The main character can't change the past of how things play out with the time traveling assassin, but the time traveling assassin CAN change the past of the terrible event she's trying to prevent. It's self-contradictory. Either the past can be changed or it can't. Even worse, in the assassin's timeline she learns who he is on her first trip back in time. All she needs to do in the second one, or the third, or even the fourth when it's all messed up already, is tell him who she is. But she doesn't, because REASONS. No really, there are no reasons. She just doesn't do it, because it would spoil the plot. Only the ending reveals that the plot is nonsensical for this reason, so... Yeah, that's just bad writing.
But it's worse than that. 12 Monkeys is tragic because the good guy fails, the bad guy wins, and the world as we know it ends. This movie is written to be the opposite, where the twist is that the guy we've been following is NOT the good guy- the good guy is the time traveling assassin who we have to assume succeeds in "saving the world."
But this is where it goes totally Watchmen on us. The assassin is murdering innocent people who might have somehow influenced someone else in a way that causes those other people to engage in acts of evil which in turn influence other people to engage in evil in a vicious spiral of horror. But don't lose the forest in all those trees. The assassin is murdering innocent people. Period. Full stop.
This isn't "going back to kill Hitler to prevent WWII." This is going back to kill Hitler's innocent music teacher who damaged his fragile psyche as a child by giving him a scolding that would have been beneficial to any normal child. And his innocent history teacher for instilling in him a sense of pride in German history. And killing some random radio announcer in England who said something negative about the Weimar Republic and got Hitler thinking, "I should overthrow this thing." The guy who created time travel in the film says exactly that. Anyone they have to kill to achieve their goal, no matter how innocent.
Make no mistake, these people are MONSTERS. In the Watchmen the big twist is that superheroes are just flawed people who don't always do the right thing or even agree on what the right thing is, but even in that morally relative story the real "heroes" do everything in their power to stop Ozymandias from murdering innocent people "for the greater good." They're just too late. Even then they can't agree on whether it's best to accept the atrocity and try to make the most of it or to expose Ozymandias for his horrible crimes, and to the writers' credit, the give the final word to the only guy who stands by his principles and the truth.
But in this film the hero arrives in time. He has a chance to stop the monster before all the innocents die. And he decides not to. In fact, the entire twist and tone are arranged as if we're supposed to be on the monster's side. Oh, she's murdering innocent people "for the greater good!" In that case, help yourself! Geeze, don't we feel like jerks for trying to save those innocents.
Look, moral philosophy is tough. There are no clear cut right and wrong answers or dividing lines. That's why great minds have been debating these subjects for as long as humans have been around. But if you came away from this film thinking, "Yeah, the time traveling assassin is right..." Well, I just hope you're never in any sort of position of power or public trust, because with that kind of thinking there is literally no atrocity you can't and won't justify. If you're not willing to draw the line at intentionally brutally murdering innocent people, where DO you draw the line?
So yeah, I this film was on track to receive a much higher rating until the very end when its plot fell apart with the whole self-contradictory time travel nonsense, and its tone went completely inverted with the "evil is okay if we're doing it for a good cause," thing.